As a City on a Hill

Daniel T. Rodgers

Published by Princeton University Press 2019

As a City on a Hill

The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon

Daniel T. Rodgers

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691184371

Overview
Contents

About this book

How an obscure Puritan sermon came to be seen as a founding document of American identity and exceptionalism

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England’s founding in 1630. More than three centuries later, Ronald Reagan remade that passage into a timeless celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop’s long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In As a City on a Hill, leading American intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea. In doing so, he brings to life the ideas Winthrop’s text carried in its own time and the sharply different yearnings that have been attributed to it since.

As a City on a Hill shows how much more malleable, more saturated with vulnerability, and less distinctly American Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” was than the document that twentieth-century Americans invented. Across almost four centuries, Rodgers traces striking shifts in the meaning of Winthrop’s words—from Winthrop’s own anxious reckoning with the scrutiny of the world, through Abraham Lincoln’s haunting reference to this “almost chosen people,” to the “city on a hill” that African Americans hoped to construct in Liberia, to the era of Donald Trump.

As a City on a Hill reveals the circuitous, unexpected ways Winthrop’s words came to lodge in American consciousness. At the same time, the book offers a probing reflection on how nationalism encourages the invention of “timeless” texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past.

Author information

Daniel T. Rodgers is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. His books include Age of Fracture, winner of the Bancroft Prize; Atlantic Crossings; Contested Truths; and The Work Ethic in Industrial America. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reviews

"World's 2018 Books of the Year"

"John Winthrop was the preacher, and his chapel may have been the main deck on the ship that took him and other Puritans to Boston in 1630. Much of the sermon is relevant to contemporary issues of work, charity, welfare, and class. . . . His work is a model of clearly written scholarship."---Marvin Olasky, World (25 Good History Reads)

"Rodgers’ superlative book is an intellectual page-turner—a muscular examination of the culture and theology behind the ‘Model,’ a cogent study of the methods by which a nation gives itself meaning through the inventive interpretation of documents from the past, and a sharp-eyed accounting of how Winthrop’s ‘city on a hill’ phrase came to be used in modern political parlance."---Patrick T. Reardon, Chicago Tribune

"In a wonderful new book, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon, distinguished intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers recaptures Winthrop’s original meaning and explains why it’s relevant to Americans today. . . . Masterful history."---Robert Tracy McKenzie, Christianity Today

"[Daniel Rodgers] argues that the comparison of America to a city on a hill that politicians often use, quoting from John Winthrop’s 1630 lay sermon ‘Model of Christian Charity,’ is not true to the sermon’s original sentiment and distorts the historical legacy of the passage. . . . It wasn’t until Cold War–era writers and thinkers revisited the ‘Model’ in search of evidence of America’s universal nature (ignoring the text’s historical context) that it regained popularity. Through a winding, enthralling timeline, Rodgers successfully illuminates the strange history of ‘a text that we think we know so well that we barely know it at all.’"

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction. “ The Most Famous Lay Sermon in All of American History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. Text
Chapter 1. Writing “A Model of Christian Charity” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
Chapter 2. “ We Shall Be as a City upon a Hill” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
Chapter 3. A Chosen People Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	44
Chapter 4. New England in a World of Holy Experiments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
Chapter 5. Left All Alone in Amer i ca Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
Chapter 6. Love Is a Bond or Ligament Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
Chapter 7. Moralizing the Market Economy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	96
Chapter 8. The Poor and the Bound aries of Obligation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
PART II. Nation
Chapter 9. Inventing Foundations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
Chapter 10. Mobile Metaphors of Nationalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
Chapter 11. From the Top Mast Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
Chapter 12. Constructing a City on a Hill in Africa Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	158
Chapter 13. The Carnage of God’s Chosen Nations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
PART III. Icon
Chapter 14. The Historical Embarrassments of New England Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Chapter 15. Puritanism in an Existentialist Key Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
Chapter 16. Arguing over the Puritans during the Cold War Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
Chapter 17. Ronald Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Chapter 18. Puritan Foundations of an “Exceptionalist” Nation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247
Chapter 19. Ambivalent Evangelicals Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	264
Epilogue. Disembarking from the Arbella Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	280
Appendix. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”: A Modern Transcription Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	289
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	341
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	345

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As a City on a Hill

The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon